Edge of the Wilderness - By Stephanie Grace Whitson Page 0,22
not taking you to scout. You be safe here in camp. You make good food when we come back with bad Indians.”
As the weeks went by, Edward began to think that “his boys” were exceptions to everything he had been taught about Indians. They were clean, honest, and, in Pope’s mind, exceptionally brave. They handled horses better than any cavalry officer Pope had ever seen. More than once he watched in open-mouthed amazement as they performed their version of a cavalry drill, clinging to their horses’ sides as the animals charged across the landscape at full speed.
Pope’s admiration for the scouts came full circle one evening when he was ladling stew into Big Amos’s bowl and asked shyly, “You think I could learn to talk Injun?” He hesitated. “I ain’t never been too smart, but I’d like to be able to talk to the boys what don’t know English.”
Big Amos’s eyes widened with surprise. Instead of answering, he looked down at Daniel Two Stars, next to him in line. “Wicaste kin waste,” Big Amos said, nodding at Pope. He is a good man. Not knowing what Big Amos had said about him, Pope blushed furiously and busied himself with cleaning a rabbit one of the scouts had brought in earlier in the day.
It wasn’t until after the rabbit stew had been consumed and most of the Dakota scouts had rolled into their blankets and gone to sleep that Daniel and Big Amos approached Pope’s shelter. Seating themselves beside his cooking fire, they motioned for Pope to join them. Daniel held up his left hand and raised his thumb. “Wanca,” he said. When Pope just stared at him, Daniel motioned for the man to raise his hand and extend his thumb. Nodding when Pope did it, Daniel extended his index finger and said, “Nonpa.”
“Oh, I get it,” Pope said, grinning. “You’re teachin’ me to count Injun’!”
“Dakota,” Daniel said gruffly. He continued counting, waiting for Pope to repeat each word, “ Yamni, topa, zaptan . . .”
After a few minutes of practice, Daniel grinned at Pope. Mimicking the boy’s accent, he said in English, “For someone who ‘ain’t never been none too smart,’ you learn Dakota fast.
West Point-trained Brady Jensen had relived the infamous cornfield scene from the Battle of Antietam a thousand times. What if he had run away in the face of the onslaught of rebels? Hadn’t dozens of other men done the same thing? They called it Bloody Monday. Twelve thousand men had died. Jensen was sorry his commanding officer had lost a hand in the melee begun by his premature retreat, but the man had lived, which was more than he deserved in Jensen’s opinion. Being reassigned to the equivalent of military hell baby-sitting a bunch of savages in Minnesota was more than a man should have to endure—even one who had had a momentary lapse of judgment in battle.
Initially, Jensen had expected to bunk with the only other white man in the bunch. But Edward Pope was made of different stuff than Jensen’s West Point comrades. He didn’t seem to mind when warm weather arrived and the Dakota made a mess of cavalry drills and charged around the camp like mindless idiots, hanging off their mounts and screaming. Pope was even trying to learn to speak their dissonant language—if one could call it a language. It rankled Jensen that apart from Sacred Lodge, the scouts made almost no attempt to speak English. Since all the native peoples on the continent would be exterminated before the millennium dawned, Jensen saw no reason to learn Dakota—a language he considered to be beneath him. He kept himself apart from the scouts, trusting Sacred Lodge to interpret his orders and waiting for the army to come to its senses and send him on to more important assignments.
“You oughter talk to them,” Pope urged Jensen. “What you gonna do when Sacred Lodge heads out and leaves us here?”
“They aren’t leaving camp without me,” Jensen asserted. “I didn’t come out here to be a cook.” He glared at Edward Pope.
Pope shrugged off the insult. “Which is better for the army,” he asked, “a good cook or an officer who won’t talk to his men?”
One spring night Jensen stalked off after arguing with Sacred Lodge about an upcoming foray to the north, Daniel said, “Let him go. He doesn’t trust us. He thinks because we don’t line up and march like white men waiting to be shot at, we make bad soldiers. He doesn’t